What Tumblr Smash Cache Does and When to Use It

08 Sep 2018

Tumblr developers love giving crazy names to their platform's features. If Tumblr Labs doesn’t freak you out, then Smash Cache most definitely will. After all, it sounds as if just tapping it would break something, right?

But contrary to its name, Smash Cache does nothing dangerous. And as weird as it sounds, it’s one of the most useful features that you can find within the Tumblr app on your iOS device.

If you are in the dark as to what it does and when you need to use it, then you are going to find out all about that pretty soon. So read on!

So What Is Smash Cache?

Tumblr app is a major resource hog, period. Not surprising when you’ve got flashy GIFs, auto-playing videos, and distracting recommendations at each and every scroll or tap. The end result — horrible performance.

To mitigate that to a certain degree, Tumblr caches some data. Supposedly, that makes the entire app function a tad faster since it doesn’t have to download individual items over and over again.

But that’s where the problem comes in. While iOS automatically manages app caches pretty well, things get out of hand with Tumblr most often than not.

The tons of multimedia content streaming into the dashboard means that the entire cache fills up significantly faster — well into the multiple gigabytes, in fact. And boy, won’t you notice it when that happens?

While iOS automatically manages app caches pretty well most of the time, things get out of hand with Tumblr most often than not.

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If you encounter any symptoms such as a lagging dashboard, sluggish scrolling or graphical anomalies, then it’s time to purge the over-bloated cache manually. Running out of storage on your iPhone or iPad can also be another reason for doing so. But how?

That’s where Smash Cache comes into the picture. Rather than removing and redownloading the Tumblr app when things start to get iffy, just ‘smash’ the cache instead, and you should be good to go in practically no time.

Putting It to Use

Getting your hands down and dirty using Smash Cache is super easy. And if you are still having concerns, then no, it doesn’t have any impact on your blogs, posts (live or scheduled), followed searches, or other configurations. In fact, it only gets rid of the accumulated junk of your previous Tumblr browsing sessions.

Start off by tapping the Settings icon after selecting any one of your blogs. On the menu that shows up, tap General Settings.

Scroll down, and then tap Smash Cache.

Just ignore that silly over-the-top message and tap Smash It.

That’s it. If you were expecting some sort of a visual effect to go along with all that built-up hype, then you will be disappointed. It does nothing of the sort — in fact, you won't even feel that you've done anything let alone 'broken' the cache, which can be a bit of a downer. C'mon, Tumblr!

Regardless, head back to the dashboard after a couple of seconds, and you should find a much better experience with Tumblr. Of course, that is until the cache fills back up, and now you know what to do with that.

Tip: To check out the amount of storage used up by Tumblr at any given time and to determine whether the cache deserves a smashing well in advance, head over to the Settings app, and then tap General > iPhone/iPad Storage > Tumblr.

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Don't Be Scared!

Tumblr is upgrading its community guidelines to battle hate speech while it's developers aim to deliver a great experience. That's why they're letting you purge the unwanted junk by making Smash Cache an excellent feature to have. Especially, for a smooth, stutter-free adventure.

And while it's not available on the Android version of the Tumblr app, you can always rely on native functionality to achieve the same purpose.

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Written By

Dilum Senevirathne has written about tech and finance for over five years. When he isn’t messing around with the latest iOS apps, you can catch him tweaking a collection of IoT gadgets. Dilum is a management accounting student and a prospective charterholder.